Omaha Poker Tournament Strategy

It may seem strange to group such different games together when talking about tournament strategy, but these two games have more in common in the adjustments you should make for tournaments than you might think.

There are obviously some notable differences but there are various areas where the two games’ strategies collide. If you are looking to make a big splash in the tournament arena, here are some areas of the game that you can work on to improve your chances of shipping a tournament and basking in the glory and $s that result from this.

The Early Stages

The early stages play fairly similarly to cash games. Stacks are deep and you should work on the good principles you’ve hopefully ingrained in your play from reading the previous Omaha strategy guides on the site. You may want to exercise a little more pot control than you might do in a cash game due to the inability to reload and the depreciating value of chips (* – see below) but generally play a good cash game and look to accumulate chips via this method.

The Middle Ground

This is where tournaments start to diverge from cash games considerably. Whereas in cash games, you have fixed blinds and generally deep stacks, as you progress in a tournament, the blinds rise and although surviving players are also accumulating chips, generally the average stack will be becoming shallower and shallower as time progresses.

What does this mean? In real terms it means, you need to start stealing more blinds! The blinds are your lifeblood and in both games, you cannot just sit passively waiting for a hand, but need to loosen your raising requirements and prevent yourself being blinded out.

The good news is that (especially in Omaha) hand values run very closely together in terms of EV. This makes a wide range of hands good for stealing blinds with. Of course it is important to profile your opponents and know which players are weaker/ more passive and therefore more likely to give up their blinds without much of a fight.

If you notice a player with a high degree of aggression, then expect him to fight back at you and make adjustments for this, either by preparing to four-bet a likely three-bet from him, or by seeing flops in position on him in a bid to outplay or use his aggression against him.

In Omaha/8 when you make steal attempts with less than premium hands, use knowledge of your tablemates’ playing tendencies to build up profiles of the kinds of hands they are likely to want to see a flop with. People tend to be a little more passive pre-flop in Omaha/8, so expect to be called more often than re-raised, and recognise opportunities to steal pots post-flop when called.

An example of this might be when you raise preflop with xxxx, and get a caller. The flop falls Qs Tc 3d and your opponent checks. This is a good spot to steal the pot, whatever your cards, as your opponent is more likely than not to have low cards and be unable to defend against your continuation bet.

Isolating Inexperienced Players

There are still many players learning the Omaha games and they will often give their lack of experience away by overplaying certain hands (e.g. small flushes) or failing to fold big pairs on dangerous boards. If you notice an inexperienced player, look to isolate any limps or even raises by them by raising them or 3-betting them with reasonable hands to drive out players behind. You want their chips in your stack, not your opponents’!

Re-stealing Spots

Just as you have to find spots to steal to stay alive, so do your opponents. This opens up a new avenue of chip accumulation for you to take advantage of. The more aggressive players will be lowering their raising standards and will now have a reasonable amount of trash hands in their range if they are raising liberally. By putting in a pot-size 3-bet you put them under a decent amount of pressure and in Omaha because very few hands are a big favourite over others, even when called you are  unlikely to be in bad shape. Hands such as suited rundowns like 7s8s9cTc are perfect for these sorts of spots – attacking aggressive players’ raises – as even when you run into a monster you won’t be very far behind.

Exercise caution of course. If the table rock raises it up, expect him to show up with a big hand, so don’t just three-bet him as he will often have it. You can still flat call with the above sort of connected hand however, assuming you aren’t too shallow (25 big blinds or more) and look to out-flop his likely premium hand.

In Omaha/8 you will often be able to tell which players are holding on for big hands like A2sxx ,Aaxx etc, so you can raise their blinds more liberally, especially from later position. With the more aggressive players, raise their blinds with stronger sets of hands, that will likely play robustly post-flop.

Bubble Play

Your stealing and re-stealing strategies should work especially well on the bubble as many players will be looking to survive through to the payout spots at this point rather than accumulate chips.

Attack small and medium stacks and be prepared to re-steal the larger stacks’ raises – who will often have a wide range of chips. Everyone else may be turning lethargic, but you should be putting pedal to the metal here and picking up lots of chips to put yourself in a good position for the final table.

These are just a few of the tournament strategies available to you in these Omaha games. As usual the best way to get better is to practise yourself so why not get stuck into some donkaments and start learning the ropes!

(* Depreciating Value of Chips. Let’s say you enter a tournament with 1,000 chips for $10. There are 100 runners and first place wins $300. At the start of the tournament, each chip is worth $10/1,000 or 1c. At the end of the tournament the winner will have 100,000 chips, and these are worth $300/100,000 or 0.3c each. The chips become individually less valuable as the tournament progresses.)